[ExI] Searle and AI

[Samantha Atkins]

On Dec 27, 2009, at 9:19 AM, Damien Broderick wrote:

> On 12/27/2009 10:32 AM, Ben Zaiboc wrote:
> 
>> I was led to think that Searle believes that conscious AI is impossible (due to certain people saying things like "Strong AI of the sort that Searle refutes"), but in "Why I Am Not a Property Dualist", he says:
>> 
>> "Maybe someday we will be able to create conscious artifacts, in which case subjective states of consciousness will be ‘physical’ features of those artifacts"
>> 
>> and
>> 
>> "Consciousness is thus an ordinary feature of certain biological systems, in the same way that photosynthesis, digestion, and lactation are ordinary features of biological systems"
> 
> Yes, and this is what his more careless disciples (and foes) seem to overlook. It's why John Clark's repeated wailing about Darwin misses the point. Searle knows perfectly well that consciousness is a feature of evolved systems (and so far only of them); he is arguing that current computational designs lack some critical feature of evolved intentional systems.

Fair enough.  The Turing machine notion and the von Neumann architecture are indeed bottlenecks in computing.  So are the limits of the human mind which manifest in limitations of the type of computing architectures we can actually think dependably about, design and debug.   Our skills as programmers are woefully inefficient to understand and debug the design of the human brain/mind.   We understand more and more aspects of course and may emulate them but not in standard computer architectures or programming languages.    So I agree that other approaches are essential to AGI and even to the further advancement of software generally.  The human programmer must come out of the loop or interact with the process in a much less obtrusive way.

> We don't know that this is wrong. The wonderfully named Dr. Johnjoe McFadden, professor of molecular genetics at the University of Surrey and author of Quantum Evolution, argues ( http://www.surrey.ac.uk/qe/ ) that certain quantum fields and interactions are crucial to the function of mind.

I think that line is not fruitful.  It is tautologically true that quantum interactions are present at some level but it (so far) does not appear true that quantum effects are essential to any major part of human cognition or that there is some kind of likely quantum computer hiding in the micro-tubels  or wherever.

- samantha